EU to Provide Egypt with 8.06 Billion Dollars over Three Years
Sudan Events – Agencies
The European Union will provide Egypt with 7.4 billion euros ($8.06 billion) in financing from 2024-2027 under a deal for expanded cooperation to be announced in Cairo on Sunday, a senior EU Commission official said.
The money will include 5 billion euros of macro-financial assistance, 1.8 billion euros of investments and 600 million euros in grants, the official said.
The package will include billions in loans over coming years and aims to step up Egyptian energy imports to help Europe “move further away from Russian gas” amid the Ukraine war, a senior European Commission official told reporters.
EU chief Ursula von der Leyen — who was expected in Cairo, joined by the leaders of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece and Italy — was to sign the deals later in the day with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Egypt, mired in a painful economic crisis, borders war-battered Libya and two ongoing conflicts — the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and Sudan’s war between the regular armed forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
Egypt already hosts around nine million migrants and refugees, including four million Sudanese and 1.5 million Syrians, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration.
Highly indebted Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation, is in dire need of financial help as it weathers a severe economic crisis marked by rapid inflation.
Egypt’s economy, dominated by military-linked enterprises and focused on expensive infrastructure mega-projects, has been hit hard by a series of recent economic shocks.
Egypt’s external debt has ballooned to $164.7 billion, and the cost of servicing it is expected to reach $42 billion this year.
